“The only impossible revolution, says Ceronetti in substance, one that is even inconceivable to reason, would be the revolution against machines- and this impossibility turns all other revolutions into a schizophrenic farce.”
“Waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover.”
“You are meant to start a wildfire with a single spark”
“Although armed actions have been the most dramatic, revolutionary militancy has never been limited to guns and bombs. Hundreds of political prisoners have come from pacifist circles, both secular and religious. While these activists are generally imprisoned on shorter sentences than those described above, their political actions are no less vital, their commitments no less revolutionary. Just as those who engaged in armed struggle never comprised the majority of the movements from which they came, most nonviolent activists who serve prison time for acts of civil disobedience are not revolutionaries. Yet many of them are, and their work provides a vital point through which to build strategic unity among those who differ on questions of tactics. It was, in fact, revolutionary nonviolent activists who maintained dialogue and critical support for armed revolutionaries in the 1970s when other sectors of the Left, who were often theoretically supportive of armed struggle in Third World countries, were decidedly hostile to its domestic iterations.”
“When justice becomes a commodity in the marketplace of the court system, the citizens must take it upon themselves to conduct a complete overhaul of the very democracy they are living in.”
“Anarchism is an ideology which is too realistic not to comprehend the modern world and real events. The part taken by its practitioners in these events is based on a clear understanding of the goal to be attained and the means to be used to reach it...”
“Justice isn t sold by the dozen at Target, justice must be produced out of our own blood and sweat.”
“The real practical revolution begins when you stand up in front of an everyday injustice and say - no more .”
“The battle lines were now drawn: On one side, the elites of both parties, who had governed America for decades and supported big government and a globalist interventionist Foreign policy; On the other side were the populists—the ordinary Citizens who rarely got excited about politics, but were now mobilized in rebellion against a governing class they believed was arrogant, unresponsive, and unsuccessful. It was a revolt by the governed against the governing.”
“The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man’s hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos.”
“on healing... healing as revolution healing as activism healing as social justice healing as liberation healing as re-membering ourselves...”
“The norms and institutions that order this world are not inevitable but constructed - and therefore can be changed.”
“We live in the society of the capitalist spectacle, mate, the more spectacular the better. Build it and they will come, as that old baseball movie says. We worship the event, the occasion, the unmissable show. We want Super Sunday, the Thriller in Manila, the showdown of the century…the things that bring the highest profits for the capitalist organisers. If you’re not at the event, you’re nobody. Life has passed you by. That’s the tyranny of the spectacle. Yet, if you think about it, the spectacle is the biggest joke of all – because all the people at the event are desperate not to be losers. Who wants to be in a collection of people fleeing from fear of failure? Losers and the spectacle go together, the winners performing and the losers watching. The spectacle is how losers numb the pain, how they crave to be part of something, on the winning side for once. The LLN have decided to harness the society of the spectacle too, but not the capitalist version where small groups perform to large groups and get paid a fortune. Instead, the LLN offer the spectacle of life. And Revolution is the greatest spectacle of all.”
“Revolutions are matters of constant occurrence in California. They are got up by men who are at the foot of the ladder and in desperate circumstances, just as a new political party is started by such men in our own country. The only object, of course, is the loaves and fishes; and instead of caucusing, paragraphing, libelling, feasting, promising, and lying, as with us, they take muskets and bayonets, and seizing upon the presidio and custom-house, divide the spoils, and declare a new dynasty.”
“There is no end to protest until there is an end to oppression”
“Our way of life is inherently based on masters and slaves. We bow to assorted Gods, like slaves bowing to masters. We bow to monarchs and presidents, to the rich, to celebrities. We never tire of bowing to others and getting on our knees. We are controlled at every turn. Isn’t it time to unshackle ourselves, to stand up straight for once? Isn’t it time to bring an end to the master-slave dialectic?”
“Change yourselves. Change the world. The very act of trying will inspire you. No one is saying it’s easy – it isn’t – but nothing will change without effort and struggle.”